How To Make Moving Stories Out Of Not Very Much At All

I woke early. I was in a hotel room in Brussels. Pale light nosed from behind the blackout curtain.

It was too early to get up. I tried going back to sleep but I couldn’t so I went to the loo, came back, sat on the end of my bed and drank from a bottle of water.

Something was wrong.

Why do I feel so unmoved?, I wondered.

Unmoved? In recent years, I’ve been more likely to wonder why I felt so anxious, or depressed. But unmoved was troubling too, because I was half-way through a two-day course in public speaking – a course I was running. The people I was working with had extraordinary stories to share – and all they had shared so far was data, analysis, intellect.

Why should anybody care?

Sunset in a park in Brussels. Drawn by me the night before.

When I run these sessions for professionals, I’m not surprised to find myself unmoved – at least to begin with – because professionals have spent years hiding emotion.

But the people I was working with here in Brussels ran campaigning organisations. They were environmentalists, activists for social justice. They lived and worked in former war zones. Why didn’t their stories have passion?


Arriving at the building where the training was taking place, I began by announcing that I’d woken up early, worrying about it. I said something like this:

I may be completely wrong. I often am.

But I wonder if you may have told yourself that you aren’t allowed to be emotional? Perhaps you have been told by others, who don’t want to hear what you have to say, that you are “being too emotional”.

If that’s the case, I want you to know that when they say that they’re not announcing some kind of eternal truth. It’s just another way of refusing to listen. It’s a rhetorical strategy they may not even realise they’re using.

You’re entitled to be emotional. You should be emotional. If you don’t use emotion in your speeches it’s like boxing with one arm tied behind your back.

If you don’t use emotion, it’s like you’re invisible. I can’t really “see” you.

Over the following hours, we did some exercises relating to the power of emotion. We used simple stories as vehicles for delivering that emotion.

You might be surprised to learn quite how mild some of the stories were, but when individuals delivered their talks, at the end of the day, they were transformed.

And I was thrilled.

***

Find Out More

I’m running an hour-long workshop about this.
3pm UK on 25 May 2023
For details, please join this group on Telegram